Defining a blog strategy

Mar152011

Author. Alice Short

In. Social Media, Digital

Before starting to even define a strategy it is important to ask whether ‘blogging’ is appropriate for your type of business…

Once you’ve made the decision to blog it is then important to define a strategy for doing so, as effort without direction is just wasted energy! To help you do this, here are some questions that may help:

1. Why blog?

Define your main objective….

a. To increase traffic and improve search engine optimisation?

b. For self promotion?

c. For personal expression?

d. To project your business as a credible and valued industry leader?

e. To position as “thought leaders” within your industry
f. To foster brand loyalty & brand equity

Factor 3: We decided to blog to increase traffic to our website and provide a credible resource library for our clients and website visitors. We also wanted to demonstrate that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to blogging; and disseminate our expertise across the web.

2. What do we want to achieve?

….Clearly identify what your goals will be…and how you’re going to measure them!

Factor 3: we want our blog to increase our website traffic by 60%, and also improve our positioning on Google so that we appear on the first page within 6 months for the majority of our target terms! We’ll be measuring it regularly using Google Analytics.

3. What should I blog about?

…It’s generally about having something unique or saying something in a way that makes an impact. Ask yourself:

a.   What are our interests and services?
b.   What are people currently saying about them?
c.   How can we further demonstrate what makes us unique?

Factor 3: we’ve decided to use our blog to keep people up to date with Factor 3 news, our latest projects and our musings on anything from cultural shifts through to polemics on the importance of briefing.

Remember there is no right or wrong. Your blog should be subjective and opinion based to encourage people to discuss and engage.

N.B. Don’t give away your trade secrets but encourage engagement and project credibility in your area of expertise.

4. What kind of readers are you targeting?

a.   Who are your articles for?
b.   Who will be interested in them?
c.   How can you use it as a new business tool?
d.   Who do you want your prospective clients to be?

Factor 3: We will be targeting new and existing clients, as well as providing a point of reference to potential new clients so that we can demonstrate our value within our fields of expertise.

This is a key thing to bear in mind. Your readers need to find your thoughts interesting so that they return!

5. How am I going to disseminate our articles and increase traffic?

Blogging falls in to the social media category for a reason, it creates a micro community encouraging thought and response by members of that community. Effort without dissemination is just wasted energy!!! Here are some channels that you can disseminate your articles through:

a.   Twitter
b.   Facebook
c.   LinkedIn
d.   Other social media sites
e.   Article marketing
f.   Bookmarking links
g.   Email campaigns
h.   Word of mouth
i.   RSS

Factor 3: We intend to use TwitterFeed to automatically post our articles to our new Twitter account. We will be adding links to the latest articles from our email signatures. All staff with social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) will use these to disseminate links to our articles. We will encourage new prospects to look at articles that are relevant to their requirements. We will provide links to our latest articles across all future F3 email campaigns and then we’ll polish all of this off with some article marketing!

To measure our success we will be reviewing our analytics regularly to find out what articles are most popular, where people are finding them and what effect it is having on our SEO! We will use this data to make our blog strategy work harder for us on an ongoing basis.